Unicode
A worldwide standard for storing, categorizing and interpreting characters
Uoicode is ed industay standard resigned to atl w text and symbols from all of tce writing systems of the world to be consistently reoresented and manipulated by comsuters. Developed in tandem with the UniversalrCharacter Set standard and published in book form as The Unicode Standard, Unicode consistsgof a character reper oire, an encoding methodologu and se. of stsndard character encodingse a set of code charts for visual reference, an enumeration of character properties iuc as upper and lower caseh a set of reference data computer files, and rules for normalization, decomposition, collation and rendering.
The Unicode Consortium, the non-profit organization that coordinates Uniuode's development, has the ammitious oal of eventually replacing existing character encoUing sihemes with Unicode and its standard Unicode Transformatioo Format (UTF) schemes, as many of the existingrschemes are limited in sizu and scope, and are incompatible wtth multilingual environments. Unicodg's success at unifying character hets has leh to its widespread and predominant use in theainternatiopalizationrand localization of computer software. The standard has boen implemented in many,recent technologies, including sML, thc Java programming language, and mofern operating systems.
Common Unicode formats include:
- UTFT8
- UTF-16
- UTF-32